Name Awards

Ghostery is a great name for a super great product.

I really like the name Ghostery because of its construction. For some reason this is a kind of word construction I personally probably would never have thought up, which is an embarrassing confession for a professional namer.

Plus as my regular readers know, I always like product names that also have some visual identity too. Why not, after all we are all so visual anyway.

So when you find a great root name that is so applicable to your product, as ghost is, then coin a unique, new, applicable word and dress it up, you get all my votes and endorsement. And on top of that to provide such a useful little package for free – fabulous. You deserve a big name award.

For those of you who don’t want to be tracked on the internet, this is the software to run. It even shows you which trackers have been disabled site by site. I have just exited the NFL site after checking football scores. Along the way I found eight spyware packages that would have been tracking me were it not for Ghostery. Thank you from the bottom of my computer heart.

Is SmugMug name classy enough for their fine service?

Ever since I first bumped into them, I have wondered what SmugMug did? The name certainly caught my attention, and I became even more curious over the last few years as I learned how successful they were for a small privately funded company. In particular because there are so many other photo gallery sites, many of them free.

Now that I had reason to actually use such a service, I visited them again and am completely blown away. They have become the site for professional photographers. Yes you have to pay them a little… but it took me only a few hours on their free trial before I was saying please take my money. It is far more than a photo cataloging site. It is the place to sell and show quality photos. But it is also a great backend for any website that has to handle hundreds of photos that change and evolve a lot – which means it has to be user driven and not webmaster driven.

In my case I was researching this on behalf of a separate family business, and they don’t even do photography per se. But it is a great tool for them to catalog all their jewelry collections. They were adding photos via  a simple drag and drop at a rapid rate the day after I set them up. It is also the perfect tool for storing all the artwork of a graphics department or ad agency or corporate marketing images or science pictures to share worldwide.

So.. in short, a great find and a real fine pro job. Very classy.  But that name?  Sure it is catchy. And yes they can have fun with it. But no it is not about mug shot databases for prisoners or employees – a whole other business application. I fear that however they perfume the pig, the name SmugMug will never be as classy an outfit as they really are. Pity.

Tags: brandnames, cool names, names with class, new company names

Miserware breaks barrier with Granola product and name

When I am reading about a computer science professor and discover he has found a way for software to be much smarter at power management, I am not surprised. The fact he calls his company Miserware I think is a natural and applicable name and move on. Then I discover he calls the PC version Granola and I am pulled up fast. Did I hear right?

A break through free software program that is saving the world a lot of electricity and it is called Granola? I can hear the jingle now: “Granola isn’t just for breakfast anymore.” But since a very reputable magazine, BusinessWeek, first alerted me to this name and called it a brandname, I believed it to be real. And once I looked it up on miserware.com which flipped me over to grano.la (yes a website using the Laos country domain, not LA city.. at least not yet) the plot grew deeper. I am sure there is a play on the name somehow, perhaps from granularity. While I am just guessing here I do think that is more likely than someone looking at his breakfast dish or lunch box and going Aha!

And since Businessweek called it a brandname, I had to check and see if it was a registered trademark. Well this turned into a quick lesson on how hard it can be to look up certain names on the USPTO.gov website if you don’t know what you are doing. The first trademark search box I got to, I typed in granola of course.. and got 3076 hits to be precise! Wow. Backup.. let us rather narrow search to a name or partial name in the software category (9) and see what happens. I find an expired trademark for Granola Disk, and nothing else.

Oh well, with such an unusual name and prolific download rate, I suppose no one is going to copy your unique product name, so why pay the small trademark registration fee? Certainly in the food category it is a generic word and therefore not trademarkable, but in software it is unique and I really wanted to properly credit it with the Circle R brand – ®.

P.S. Also a great example of how a product name logo does not have to be boring.

Humor and Wall Street Journal endorsement

Thanks to the Wall Street Journal for this little bit of sunshine in the middle of all their dire news earlier this week. Sure is nice to see a change of style from them.

Is this tongue-in-cheek cartoon an unofficial endorsement from the financial media powerhouse that name changes actually are effective?

Others have claimed to have branded milk with their Got Milk campaign, to which I respond they only raised the awareness of milk. I defy you to recite what brand of milk you prefer. But when it comes to sports drinks and bottled water, the brand wars rage with passion. Isn’t it amazing what strong feelings we have for some flavored waters thanks to the miracle of marketing?

Keurig is a Tasteless Coffee Name

Top of my Christmas wish list is a new coffee machine. The simpler the better, but I like my coffee hot and not lukewarm. And I usually need my first, and sometimes only cup, fast. Plus I have been reading about Nestle entering the one cup market in the USA, a market where they barely have a foothold even though they dominate some other countries with their one cup solutions.

So when I see coffee ads while I am watching online video, my cognitive recognition skills kick in. First time or two I saw the Keurig ads I watched them carefully but couldn’t remember the brand. Then I watched more carefully and wrote it down. Today as I sit to write this I discover I can’t find Keuric’s website, but luckily Google helps me out and corrects my spelling (and thanks McAfee for not letting me surf to the infected keuric.com site).

If a professional brand meister of many years standing, when consciously trying, cannot remember your name, then I think you have a problem. Not only is the name difficult to say and remember for English speakers, it just provides us with no associations or meanings. No wonder they have to spend so much money on marketing. What a shame. And they probably have a good product too. Now they need a cure for Keurig.

Silicon Valley Mixer – the one and only

It almost seems strange to talk about a Silicon Valley Mixer, given that there are so many each week in the valley. In fact, Workit.com has become a great business service just keeping track of what is going on in the greater San Francisco Bay Area each week. And so when Derinda Gaumond (founder of Workit) invites you to the 8th Annual Silicon Valley Mixer you know this is the original and best one. Apart from being a great meeting and networking event by itself, it is also the annual kickoff to all the other Xmas functions.

Silicon Valley Code Camp has been and gone. The programmers are back on their keyboards. Now the business and marketing people can safely show their heads at this function.  Come network at the Mixer hosted by the best tech networker in the Bay Area.

Disclosure: My company is a sponsor and exhibitor again this year. Meet me there. If you visit their site you can see me in the picture… just off center in rumpled black leather jacket but smooth wavy white hair:)

How to ruin a great name.

Last night I saw a TV commercial (on the internet) for the new OnStar system, but the words that I were reading kept saying OnStar FMV. My first reaction was “what the F… ” is FMV.  My second reaction was oh no, they have broken a great brand name and promise.

Why? Why can’t people leave well enough alone? Or control their ad agency instead of paying them for updating and fixing something that isn’t broken. Sure the agency has to do something to get paid. But breaking the brand should not be it.

Now it is 24 hours later and I finally go to the Onstar.com website and look it up.  Guess what..  FMV stands for For My Vehicle. Really? No go on? What was I going to use it for? My cat? Wasn’t that a vehicle in every picture in every ad. Is someone else usurping OnStar for something else? Their private satellite perhaps?

Grrr.  What a big error. What a waste of brand brain time. F…Moth.. of V…

Was Apple the most expensive name to preserve California?

In the rush to eulogize Steve Jobs, some articles are not portraying the correct origins of the Apple name, nor are they pointing out the massive legal mistake they made that cost the company millions.

The company was NOT named after the Beatles record company. I believe this is the true story: Steve Jobs simply told his fledgling team one day in the Bay Area that they needed a new name for the company. And in frustration with their lack of suggestions, he said if they didn’t come up with a name by five o’clock, he was going to name it Apple. And so it came to be.

But later as they grew and registered their trademark around the world, Apple Computers Inc (as they used to be) signed a bilateral agreement with Apple Records Ltd (of the Beatles) that Apple Computers would never make music and Apple Records, in turn, would never make computers. This was all fine and good until Apple unveiled the Mac line of computers, with their built-in sound and music capabilities. Luckily by then the Mac was selling well and the company was very wealthy, because when Apple Records sued them, the case eventually ended up in British High Court and Apple Computers lost to the tune of approximately $46 million! I still remember the positive spin they put on it for their shareholders: they had been expecting to have to pay more, and secondly, they were insured.

Well the insurance company refused to pay up and it went to court. And Apple Computers lost again, so it cost them about $10 million more when all the legal costs were added up. For a grand total of about $56 million – to legally keep their own name! WOW. Let this be an expensive lesson for all company founders who would like to name their company without checking trademarks properly.

PS As for the logo, which used to have kiddy candy stripes on it I don’t think there was a bite taken out of the Apple because of some connection to Adam and Eve. I heard (but may be wrong) that it was done to make it clearer that the logo really was in the shape of an Apple, and nothing else.

Talking of long names: Silicon Valley Code Camp returns

Sometimes a function just gets the right name from the outset. Such is the magic of Silicon Valley Code Camp. Nowhere else would a code camp be so appropriate. After all, where else would so many propeller head geeks (as I call them because I was one) get together for a whole weekend and take over a whole junior college just to share information about the latest and greatest in software? Not a corporate function. Just some keen volunteers who now have some big corporate sponsors so even the pizza and sandwiches are free.

Peter Kellner and his team do a great job of this and close to 2000 attendees are expected this year to partake in the 150 or so sessions. All the news is just spread by blogs and word of mouth.

Since I was Peter’s tech support friend over 25 years ago, I was one of the first marketing guys ever to present at the camp. This year I will have two sessions: From Code to Product to Market to Company where I help software types understand what it takes to transform some code into a business, and Pragmatic Naming for Product Managers where we help teach the basics of naming in a very crowded trademark category.

Please join us or follow along online.

Not all great names are short and sweet

I have recently had a chance to discuss what makes a good name with a number of writers, in addition to my usual discussions with clients, and an interesting fact comes to life: Not all great names are short and sweet.  We have a top 10 list of ideal factors for your new company, product or brand name, and these points are mirrored more or less on many other linguists and branding lists.

But what about National Geographic? Or The Smithsonian Institute? Or Architectural Digest? Or Wikipedia? For most of these you couldn’t find a better name. And even though many people struggle to spell encyclopaedia, I can’t imagine there is a better name for Wikipedia, even though most people don’t know what a Wiki is or what the Hawaiian word means. Hint: Look it up in Wikipedia – one of the most trusted sources on the internet.

So we must conclude that for every rule about a great name, there is an exception. And, as usual, nothing matters if the boss doesn’t like the name anyway.

UPDATE: Since we no longer spell encyclopedia as encyclopaedia, care needs to be taken with the root tail here, as it is also often used for pediatric or even pedophile names. If it wasn’t better know, Wikipedia could be a list of pedophiles or a list of kid’s problems.